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THEME:Should agricultural statistics be responsibility of National Statistical Offices or Ministries of Agriculture ?Author: Mrs Clémentine Ananga MessinaInstitution: Ministry of agriculture and rural development Department: Department of Surveys and agric statistics /DirectorCity , -Yaoundé; Country: -. Cameroon ;P.O.B: 6931 e-mail address: c_ananga@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT • Agricultural Statistics are indispensable in designing development policies in the agricultural sector and the national economy in general. They constitute a sub-system within the National System of Statistics (NSS). The NSS operates on the basis of consultation and coordination and mainly seeks to harmonize concepts, definitions, methods, indexes and nomenclatures. In general, the NSS is organized in two distinct forms: centralization, practiced by some developed countries where the National Institutes are responsible for producing all public statistics; and decentralization whereby public statistics are produced by more than one organization. • In France, for instance, the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) is the main and most renowned statistic institute, although there are departments in ministries in charge of producing statistics at the ministerial level in their respective fields of activities. A sound coordination of activities is carried out by the National Council of Statistical Information (Conseil national de l’information statistique). • In Africa, and more especially in French-speaking African countries, the system applied is decentralization but it is poorly coordinated. The national system of agricultural statistics in Africa as a whole suffers from a sheer lack of identity and appropriation. Whereas National Institutes of Statistics are generally responsible for all official statistics, agricultural statistics are usually under the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock which has local services in all administrative constituencies across the country. Moreover, there is little collaboration between services in charge of agricultural statistics and the National Institute of Statistics (NIS). • This paper discusses who should be in charge and makes the case for a clear-cut description of responsibilities in the production of statistics, as well as the promotion of partnership between NIS and agricultural statistics services. If adopted these measures will certainly help break this isolation and improve the production of agricultural statistics.
PLAN • Introduction • Statistical system • Elements of a statistical system • Statistical consultation coordination • Few examples • Cameroon’s case
I-Introduction (1) The aim of public statistics, as opposed to mathematical or experimental statistics, is to provide a data-based description of the socio-economic situation of a country so as to enable decision-makers to base their actions on a sound and objective foundation.
I-Introduction (2) Agriculture is one of the areas concerned with public statistics. Agricultural statistics are important in designing development policies in the agricultural sector and the national economy at large. However, there are a number of constraints plaguing the designation of the organization that should be in charge of producing such statistics. Every country has a statistical system that needs to be reviewed in order to identify the characteristics of each form of organization.
II- The statistical system A set of elements and their mutual relationship • Each element may be considered as a system or a sub-system • Each sub-system has its own organization and its own management • The global system may or may not have its own organization or management.
The elements of a statistical system : • The central statistical organism ( for example: the National Institute of Statistics); • Departments in charge of statistics in ministries (for example: the Department of Agricultural Surveys (DEA), etc.); • The statistics services in various organizations; • Producers of administrative data that can be used as statistics; • Committees or commissions (when such organizations exist) in charge of the functioning of the system, for example the National Council of Statistics; • Training institutions.
In some countries, there is usually some sort of misunderstanding of how statistics pertaining to the various fields of study are managed. A difference must indeed be made between the institutions that request and analyze data and those that produce such data. The former are not really statistical institutions, but they are directly related to the fields of study for which they are responsible. Such user institutions are numerous and isolated and include ministries, public or private offices, research institutes, professional organizations, NGOs, international organizations, etc.
However, some of these institutions that use statistics should also be producers. That is usually the case in Africa where ministries of agriculture, that use agricultural statistics, also have a department of statistics in charge of conducting surveys on the agricultural sector. Yet, such institutions produce only part of the statistics they use and, on the other hand, they produce statistics that can be used by other institutions. How then can the production and dissemination of public statistics be optimized?
Through the establishment of a “National System of Statistics” (NSS), which we define here as the set of services that produce statistics and help to attain one common goal: the provision of socio-economic statistical information to those who need it, including government, economic stakeholders, the civil society, academics and researchers, international organizations, etc. • NSS is not a mere combination of elements strictly centred around the word ‘statistics’. It is an entity that must have objectives as well as the means needed to achieve them.
III-Statistical consultation and coordination III-1. Objectives The objectives of consultation and coordination can be summarized in two points: • To make all of a country’s public statistics production available for all users; which implies that all statistical operations, no matter which ministerial department conducts them, should be designed and carried out using harmonized conceptual and technical bases. • To avoid duplication , and competition among actions, and pool scarce resources: • technical (survey, manual or computer-assisted processing, analysis, setting up a data base, dissemination); or • material (computers and other equipment, vehicles, etc.).
III-2. Instruments To guarantee comparability and complementarity between statistical sources, all services using or producing statistics must use common instruments, including: • concepts and definitions (for example ‘farm household, farm, assets); • nomenclature (for agricultural products, for activities); • indexes (for the enterprises and establishments, or for modern farms); • methodologies (techniques for data collection and processing).
III-3. Centralization or Decentralization? Centralisation the central statistical organism is responsible for all or most of the fields in statistical production. Advantages of centralization Economies of scale Homogeneity of the corps of statistician Automatic harmonization of concepts, methods, nomenclatures, etc.
Decentralization Each field in statistical production is under a specific ministry or organism in charge of the said field. Advantages of decentralization Easy access to data production units Reduction of collection costs More collaboration between national institutes and sector decision makers in the sub-system concerned
Decentralization constraints Steering of the system made more difficult Programme of action not harmonized Concepts, methods and nomenclature inconsistent Decentralized system cannot achieve optimum functioning without solid coordination, i.e. “Governance” of the system
IV- Few examples IV.1- Centralized systems • Canada • Sweden • Holland • Germany • etc. Canada, for instance, has a completely centralized system. This means that only one statistical institution has the responsibility of conducting all statistical studies for organizations in charge of various economic or social sectors (e.g. Agriculture
Culture Etc. Agriculture NIS Health work Education IV.2-Decentralized systems with solid coordination • France, • U.K., • etc
Agriculture Etc. Health NIS Culture work Education IV.3-Decentralized systems with little coordination (1) • USA, • French-speaking Africa, • etc
IV.3-Decentralized systems with little coordination (2) In Africa, the decentralized form of organization is dominant, though with some variations. There is usually on the one hand, a National Institute of Statistics (NIS), which deals with demographic and economic statistics as well as most household statistics, and on the other hand, statistical services specialized in various sectors, including agriculture. Indeed, agriculture employs over 50% of the working population in Africa. In general, farmers use rudimentary farming methods and live in rural areas. Yet, most NIS in Africa are based in the provincial capital and, most often, they do not reach the crucial size that might make them efficient and enable them to cover all the administrative units due to lack of personnel and financial means. In contrast, ministries in charge of agriculture have their services even in the smallest constituencies of the country. These ministries are also responsible for conducting major operations (agricultural censuses), but the NIS must provide them with significant assistance both upstream (designing and appropriation of new methods or techniques, or new tools) and downstream (analysis and dissemination).
V- Cameroon’s Case The National System of Cameroonian Statistical information (SNIS) regroups the set of the structures that intervene in the production, the publication, the diffusion and the use of the statistical information. The SNIS is organized around: Of the National Council of the Statistical, consultative organ of the government in statistical matter with expertise on the coordination and the control of the statistical activity; • The National institute of the Statistical with 10 provincial Agencies; • The Statistical Services in the Sectorial Administrations; • Of other specialized agencies, notably the Central Office of Census and studies of Population (BUCREP); • The universities, the big schools and the centers of research; • The private offices of survey and the employers' and professional organizations .
The structures that intervene in the production statistic data • The National institute of the Statistical; • The Ministry of agriculture; • The Ministry of the raising of the Fishing and the Animal Industries; • The high schools and the universities; • The NGO and the offices of study, etc. These structures operate non concerted manner the most often; and in the case of some offices of study, the rules of the art concerning plan of poll, of formation of land staff, of quality control, etc.
All it has for consequences: • The contradictory data production; • The production of the bad quality data • The duplication of the investigations on the same • domain of investigating; • The lack of comparability of the data produced, etc.
To put a term to this navigation to view that has unfortunately again in part right of city, the government created the National Council of the Statistical loaded to orient the statistical activity in Cameroon. It is necessary to underline however to deplore it that this structure only plays a consultative role and doesn't have ell ascendancy on offices of study, on the NGO, and on the other private organizations. The agricultural statistics production is currently a very arduous task in Cameroon. The obstacles and the problems are numerous, of the conception of the investigations until the publication of the results while passing by the collection and the treatment of the data. One can mention some problems met to the level of the collection:
V-1. Level of education of the agriculturists: Most chiefs of exploitation in the traditional sector have a low level of education that doesn't pass the one of the primary school. Therefore, these operators don't understand the good founded of statistics and don't hold any accounting on their exploitation. They don't have any notion of the cultivated surface, of the surface the exploitation, the density, the quantity of the inputs used, etc. This situation brings the investigators to make themselves of the measures of the fields and parcels. It returns the heavy, laborious and very expensive investigations.
V-2. Management of the operators Not only the peasants don't have a precise idea of the surfaces, but especially the exploitations are the domestic, collective or communal entities where cultivate several agricultural households at a time. However the unit of contact is the agricultural household and very often the unit of analysis is the agricultural exploitation. This situation often makes fuzzy the variables as the surface cultivated of the household, the fallow, the surface of the exploitation that one wants to bind the most often to the agricultural household. To ask the question therefore to a household on his/her/its exploitation becomes for the case of the very ambiguous surfaces. In more the fashion to make - to be worth is so complex in sub-Saharan Africa that it is well difficult to classify what is part of the exploitation or no.
V-3. Production Practices Another thick handicap for the agricultural statistics in Cameroon, it is the production practices. There is not a formal and established rule in the association of the agric products in the traditional an most common farm. The Ministry of agriculture tried in 1998 to take out again the different associations of cultivations in order to establish a relation between the type of field and the different densities. In the other hand, the fact that we have five distinct and different ecological zones leads to five distinct farm systems yet to be analysed in details.
V-4. Fashion of semi and of harvest In some farm systems, one recovers in a particular farm, a same product having different stages of age. In the fields of peanut of the first cycle, one plants cassava with gaps of 3 to four meters. When one harvests the peanut, one completes the empty spaces let by new cassava seedlings; what brings back the spacing between the feet of cassava to 1 meter. In other parcels, one recovers the cassava of one year associated to the cassava that didn't go back again in production. He/it puts himself/itself here the real density problem. A preoccupation is to determine the best moment to put the squares of density. The output and the real level of production of the agric products and continuous harvesting pose also enormous difficulties; it is the case of cassava.
Conclusion (1) Between total centralization and total decentralization, there are intermediary solutions which, while applying the principle of decentralization, help to mitigate the shortcomings of a totally decentralized system. Such solutions include: As mentioned earlier, strong coordination must first of all be ensured within the national system of statistics among various institutions, especially between the department of agricultural surveys and NIS. This coordination falls naturally under the responsibility of NIS. As stated in PROSMIC, “technical coordination, i.e. bringing institutions closer so as to avoid duplications, will not be enough either, if, upstream, pre-eminence of national institutes of statistics is not recognized in terms of conceptual and methodological coordination”.
Conclusion (2) Secondly, it can be envisaged that major special operations, involving heavy ,tasks of data collection, compilation and analysis, and aimed at determining macroéconomic indicators such as employment, inflation, consumption, national accounts; be backed in their majority by NIS which generally has more skilled staff than the departments of agricultural surveys and statistics, and that current and more specific operations be put under the responsibility of these departments.
